larry wrote in news:Xns9A35D2BBAFB1noonehomecom@
208.49.80.253:

By the way, Seatalk isn't rocket science. Connect Seatalk data wire
(Yellow) to an RS-232C data in pin (pin 3 on the 25pin/pin 2 on the 9
pin) and hook Seatalk ground to computer data ground pin (7 on the
25, 5 on the 9). (I use little mini clips and made a snooping test
cable.) Boot good old Hyperterm. Save you a dumb terminal ASCII.ht
connection to make it easier to come back. Mine's on my laptop.
Plug Seatalk Hyperterm and look at the data, yourself, as it streams
by. At some point, after it has filled the buffer, pull the plug and
look down through the data for noise and crazy bits. Seatalk isn't
encrypted...


To further correct Larry's statement, SeaTalk is encrypted in the sense
that it's a binary protocol. Datagrams are between 3 and 18 bytes in
length and are totally binary (the messages don't contain any ASCII
characters like you'd see in a NMEA sentence). Thus Hyperterm won't do you
any good unless a version that display hex bytes and knows how/when to
terminate a datagram.

-- Geoff
www.GeoffSchultz.org